I primarily develop windows, web/mvc and service applications and use VS2010, SQL 2008 RS, etc. I'm thinking that there are some services/features enabled by default that can be safely disabled, but would like to get some input before I engage in some trial and terror.

1% is probably a bit low unless you have a rather high end system. I just checked my dual core laptop ~23.5hours uptime, and have 55 minutes of DWM and 34m under various svchost processes. That's about 2% for DWM and 1.2% for everything else. Even with my work laptop being an core core2 duo, you'd probably need an current generation Intel quadcore or AMD hexcore system to push it down to 1%.
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Dan NeelySep 28 '11 at 17:36

I mostly agree with surfasb; for win7 MS was very aggressive in switching non-essential services from starting automatically to only starting on demand. Unlike in older versions of windows there's really not any significant amount of room to gain by fiddling with OS services. If you install a million crapware apps that lurk in the tray and load at startup you can still run into trouble; but it won't be the OSes fault.